User:Dominik.epple

Install Guide

About this document

The aim of this document is to replace the existing quickinstall guides to provide a more extensive view on "single node and beyond" topics, follow closer to existing "best practices" (also, but not only security-wise) and point out what needs to be changed in clustered installations.

Most of the commands given in this document thus assume a high level design of "single-node, all-in-one".

This document was created on Debian Stretch (which, as of time of writing, is not even supported yet) --

Preparations

System update

You want to start on latest patchlevel of your OS:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install less vim pwgen apt-transport-https

reboot

Pregenerate passwords

In contrast to previous guides this guide shall feature copy-paste ready commands which create installations with no default passwords.

We will pre-generate some passwords which will live as dotfiles in /root. This is way better than having passwords with "secret" everywhere.

pwgen -c -n 16 1 > /root/.oxpw
pwgen -c -n 16 1 > /root/.dbpw
pwgen -c -n 16 1 > /root/.dbrootpw

Prepare database

In real-world installations this will probably be multiple galera clusters of a supported flavor and version. For educational purposes a standalone DB on our single-node machine is sufficient.

Even for single-node, don't forget to apply database tuning. See our oxpedia articles for default tunings. Note that typically you need to re-initialize the MySQL datadir after changing InnoDB sizing values, and subsequently start the service:

mysql_install_db
service mysql restart

We aim to create secure-by-default documentation, so here we go: Run mysql_secure_installation, and chose every security relevant option, but let the root password empty in this step, as we set it in the next step:

mysql -e "UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('$(cat /root/.dbrootpw)') WHERE User='root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;"
cat >/root/.my.cnf <<EOF
[client]
user=root
password=$(cat /root/.dbrootpw)
EOF

These credentials also needs to be put in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf.

Cluster note

On multiple db clusters, do it per node analogously. Just be aware the copy-paste command above expects the /root/.dbrootpw file.

Prepare OX user

While the packages will create the user automatically if it does not exist, we want to prepare the filestore now, and we need the user therefore.

useradd -r open-xchange

In a clustered environment, you might prefer to hard-wire the userid and groupid to the same fixed value. Otherwise, if you want to use a NFS filestore, you'll run into permissions problems.

groupadd -r -g 999 open-xchange
useradd -r -g 999 -u 999 open-xchange

Prepare filestore

There are several options here.

Single-Node: local directory

For a single-node installation, you can just prepare a local directory:

mkdir /var/opt/filestore
chown open-xchange:open-xchange /var/opt/filestore

NFS

If using NFS:

Setup on the NFS server:

apt-get install nfs-kernel-server
service nfs-kernel-server restart

Configure /etc/exports. This is for traditional ip based access control; krb5 or other security configuration is out of scope of this document.

mkdir /var/opt/filestore
chown open-xchange:open-xchange /var/opt/filestore
echo "/var/opt/filestore 192.168.1.0/24(rw,sync,fsid=0,no_subtree_check)" >> /etc/exports
exportfs -a

Clients can then mount using

mkdir /var/opt/filestore
mount -t nfs -o vers=4 nfs-server:/filestore /var/opt/filestore

Or using fstab entries like

nfs-server:/filestore /var/opt/filestore nfs4 defaults 0 0

Object Store

You can use an object store. For lab environments Ceph is a convenient option. For demo / educational purpuses a "single node Ceph cluster" even co-located on your "single-node machine" is reasonble, but its setup is out of scope of this document. If you want to use this, be prepared to provide information about endpoint, bucket name, access key, secret key.

No filestore

If you dont want to provide a filestore, you can configure OX later to run without filestore. (Q: do we still need a dummy registerfilestore on a local directory in that event?)

Prepare mail system

Out of scope of this document. Let's assume you've got a mail system with smtp and imap endpoints where users can authenticate using their email address and a password. We assume separate / exsting provisioning for the scope of this document.

Install OX software

You need an ldb user and password for updates and proprietary repos. If you dont have such a user, you can still install the free components. You'll get a lot of authentication failed warnings however from apt tools unless you deconfigure the closed repos.

wget http://software.open-xchange.com/oxbuildkey.pub -O - | apt-key add -
wget -O/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ox.list http://software.open-xchange.com/products/DebianJessie.list
ldbuser=...
ldbpassword=...
sed -i -e "s/LDBUSER:LDBPASSWORD/$ldbuser:$ldbpassword/" /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ox.list
apt-get update
apt-get install open-xchange open-xchange-authentication-database open-xchange-grizzly open-xchange-admin open-xchange-appsuite-backend open-xchange-appsuite-manifest open-xchange-appsuite

Cluster note

• if you want to have separate frontend (apache) and middleware (open-xchange) systems, make sure to install packages which require apache as dependency on the frontend nodes, and packages which require java as a dependency on the middleware nodes. Currently this results in the split
  • Middleware nodes: open-xchange open-xchange-authentication-database open-xchange-grizzly open-xchange-admin open-xchange-appsuite-backend open-xchange-appsuite-manifest
  • Frontend nodes: open-xchange-appsuite
• If you want to use an object store, install the corresponding open-xchange-filestore-xyz package, like open-xchange-filestore-s3
• For hazelcast session storage, install also open-xchange-sessionstorage-hazelcast

Install database schemas

If the DB runs on localhost and you have root access, you can use

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/initconfigdb --configdb-pass="$(cat /root/.dbpw)" -a

Cluster note

Create the DB users on all write instances manually.

mysql -e "grant all privileges on *.* to 'openexchange'@'%' identified by '$(cat /root/.dbpw)';"

Run initconfigdb with some more options:

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/initconfigdb --configdb-user=openexchange --configdb-pass="$(cat /root/.dbpw)" --configdb-host=configdb-writehost

(initconfigdb needs to be run only once on one cluster node)

Initial configuration

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/oxinstaller --add-license=no-license --servername=oxserver --configdb-pass="$(cat /root/.dbpw)" --master-pass="$(cat /root/.oxpw)" --network-listener-host=localhost --servermemory 1024

Cluster Note

--configdb-readhost=...
--configdb-writehost=...
--imapserver=...
--smtpserver=...
--mail-login-src=<login|mail|name>
--mail-server-src=<user|global>
--transport-server-src=<user|global>
--jkroute=APP1
--object-link-hostname=[service DNS name like ox.example.com]
--extras-link=[1]
--name-of-oxcluster=[something unique per cluster, like business-staging; see --servername]
--network-listener-host=<localhost|*>

oxinstaller needs to be run on each cluster node with identical options besides the jkroute, which must be unique per cluster node and match the corresponding apache option, see below.

Start the service:

systemctl restart open-xchange

Cluster Note

Start the service on every cluster node.

Registering stuff

Register the "server:

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/registerserver -n oxserver -A oxadminmaster -P "$(cat /root/.oxpw)"

Cluster Note

All the register* commands need to be issued only once per cluster, as the effect is to enter corresponding lines in the configdb.

And the filestore:

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/registerfilestore -A oxadminmaster -P "$(cat /root/.oxpw)" -t file:/var/opt/filestore -s 1000000 -x 1000000

Cluster Note

If you chose an object store, the corresponding registerfilestore line reads as follows (Ceph radosgw example):

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/registerfilestore -A oxadminmaster -P "$(cat /root/.oxpw)" -t s3://radosgw -s 1000000 -x 1000000

It requires configuration of the object store in filestore-s3.properties:

com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.endpoint=http://localhost:7480
com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.bucketName=oxbucket
com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.region=eu-west-1
com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.pathStyleAccess=true
com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.accessKey=...
com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.secretKey=...
com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.encryption=none
com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.signerOverride=S3SignerType
com.openexchange.filestore.s3.radosgw.chunkSize=5MB

Changing this file needs another

service open-xchange restart

And the database:

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/registerdatabase -A oxadminmaster -P "$(cat /root/.oxpw)" -n oxdb -p "$(cat /root/.dbpw)" -m true

Cluster Note

You probably have multiple clusters with read and write URLs. Register them each like first registering the master, subsequently registering the slave URL with the corresponding master ID:

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/registerdatabase -A oxadminmaster -P "$(cat /root/.oxpw)" -n oxdb -p "$(cat /root/.dbpw)" -m true

This command gives as output the id of the registered db master, like

database 3 registered

Here, the id is 3. Use this id as argument of the -M switch of the next command:

/opt/open-xchange/sbin/registerdatabase -A oxadminmaster -P "$(cat /root/.oxpw)" -n oxdbr -p "$(cat /root/.dbpw)" -m false -M 3

Configure Apache

Create config files /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/proxy_http.conf, /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf by copy-pasting as explained in AppSuite:Open-Xchange_Installation_Guide_for_Debian_8.0#Configure_services

Configure modules and restart:

a2enmod proxy proxy_http proxy_balancer expires deflate headers rewrite mime setenvif lbmethod_byrequests
systemctl restart apache2

Cluster Note

Make sure that each middleware node got its unique server.properties:com.openexchange.server.backendRoute, e.g. APP1, APP2, APP3, etc.

Configure them in the http proxy definitions like

BalancerMember http://ox1:8009 timeout=100 smax=0 ttl=60 retry=60 loadfactor=50 route=APP1
BalancerMember http://ox2:8009 timeout=100 smax=0 ttl=60 retry=60 loadfactor=50 route=APP2
BalancerMember http://ox3:8009 timeout=100 smax=0 ttl=60 retry=60 loadfactor=50 route=APP3

If you colocate apache on middleware nodes, you might want to minimize cross-node routing, by setting on each node for the local node a loadfactor=50 and for the other nodes a status=+H instead of the loadfactor. E.g. on node ox1:

BalancerMember http://ox1:8009 timeout=100 smax=0 ttl=60 retry=60 loadfactor=50 route=APP1
BalancerMember http://ox2:8009 timeout=100 smax=0 ttl=60 retry=60 status=+H route=APP2
BalancerMember http://ox3:8009 timeout=100 smax=0 ttl=60 retry=60 status=+H route=APP3

However this requires host-specific config files for apache http proxy.